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Opinion Contributor

President Obama’s real agenda

Obama is not trying to unite the country, the authors write. | AP Photo

By DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN and PATRICK H. CADDELL | 3/1/13 8:34 AM EST

“Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go,” President Obama said last week, flanked by uniformed firefighters and law-enforcement officers. “Tens of thousands of parents will have to scramble to find child care for their kids.” He went on: “Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed.”

Scared yet? In his Saturday radio address, the president made clear who was at fault for this impending Armageddon: “Are Republicans in Congress really willing to let these cuts fall on our kids’ schools and mental health care just to protect tax loopholes for corporate jet owners? Are they really willing to slash military health care and the Border Patrol just because they refuse to eliminate tax breaks for big oil companies?”

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The president is obviously going all-out — but not to avoid the $85 billion in spending cuts, known as the sequester, set to kick in on Friday. Obama doesn’t want to make a deal with Republicans. His fear-mongering is part of a concerted plan that extends far beyond the sequester crisis: to obliterate the Republican Party as a viable force in American political life.

His self-righteous rhetoric obscures a bitter truth: Obama is not trying to unite the country. He’s waging a class-based battle for political gain. His goal is to win back the House for Democrats in 2014, giving him a united Congress for his last two years in office and allowing him to pursue the most expansive government in American history.

Listening to Obama, an ordinary American might assume that the Republicans were forcing these harsh spending cuts on the president. In fact, they were the president’s idea, part of a compromise to make the 2011 debt-ceiling deal. And as Bob Woodward reminded readers in an op-ed last on Sunday, that agreement did not include the “new revenue” (i.e., tax hikes) that Obama pretends he asked for then: “When the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts….that was not the deal he made.”

Obama, then, is not being truthful — nor is he making even minimal efforts to find a compromise with Republicans. It actually made news last week when the White House made a few perfunctory calls to GOP leaders.

So here we are again, stuck in America’s ongoing political groundhog day: Obama makes the same claims, with the same results. Republicans dig in, vow no more compromises, then surrender wholesale. Neither side levels with the American people or speaks to their real anxieties — from rising food and gas prices to chronic and pervasive unemployment.

It seems increasingly clear that Obama’s legacy will not be balancing the budget or bringing together a divided country, but rather, expanding the size and scope of government like no one since Lyndon Johnson — but without the revenue or political support that LBJ enjoyed. In 1965 and 1966, when Johnson was at the peak of his power, he passed major legislation with bipartisan support. Still, he overreached, and eventually he lost his huge majorities. Obama’s overreaching is much worse. He thinks he can do whatever he wants, even without Republicans votes.